Month: January 2017

Two interesting looking books popped up on my Kindle this week: Rivers of Gold by Adam Dunn and The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins. Both sounded gritty and noir-ish for different reasons, so I was pleased to give them a go. After finishing, I had a strange feeling, kind of like waking up after being hit by a plank of wood to find a credit card receipt for 20 shots of premium tequila in my pocket.

I guess you could say that’s my masculine side coming out. I felt like a man – a manly man. Because, these books are just that – totally – manly.

The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins
First up, this is a collection of short stories written by a current inmate serving life without parole for a murder during a ‘botched’ house robbery. The first thing you notice in this collection is how well it’s written. This isn’t a teenager writing fan fiction, this is someone who knows their craft, and I suppose he should as he has an MFA from Western Michigan University. This book isn’t actually out yet and the publishers have asked that no quotes be shared, but I’ll just say this, the authority of the stories just melts off the pages.

The setting is mostly Kalamazoo Prison, Michigan and the narrator seems to be often the same person interspersed with an Arthur or a George as he tells us their stories too. He takes us through a wide range of experiences from Processing to spending time in Quarantine before being sent to a prison, to the prison itself. It feels dramatically realistic, but there’s also a smattering of the supernatural too.

Where this book really shines is in the glimpses of insights into how an obviously intelligent and educated man mitigates the monotony of life in prison. Early on, ‘I’ tells us he isn’t normally a sociable person, talking for no reason, but in jail, you have to be, as there’s nothing else to do. And I think many of us could imagine this of ourselves (imagine it and shudder). So in order to reconnect with the outside world, he calls random numbers collect (he doesn’t have any personal contacts he can call) in the hope that someone on the other end will talk to him for 15 minutes, or at least let him listen to the traffic noise outside their house or the background TV and this as an idea is mesmerizing. In a nutshell, this book is mesmerizing, like been taken for an experience which I hope I’ll never encounter, but for which I’m grateful for the advice. It reads partly like a diary, partly like a philosophy.

However, a couple of factors got in the way of absolute pleasure. First off, there’s the issue of the author. If you want to learn more about him, check out Bullmenfiction.

The phrase, “I shot a man dead who had no business being shot” shows up here and this reeks of a lack of genuine remorse. If I went to someone’s house and shot them without any reason, I hope I could muster up a little more emotion than that, but hey. The other issue is the short story format. I wish to high heaven, this were a novel, but alas, I’m guessing Mr, Curtis doesn’t have his own personal MacBookPro in his cell with all his research and files neatly organized in coloured folders. And you know what they say, if you don’t want short stories, don’t read them. It’s a free world – for some of us.

Rivers of Gold by Adam Dunn

Okay, hold on tight. NYC 2013. Man in a taxi thinking about money and sex. My first impression of Renny was that he was a fat, boring version of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho travelling through an NYC that seemed recognizable to me. But wait, it’s meant to be a dystopian future version of NYC after some huge financial crash and an over running of drugs… It’s always tough when fiction falls short of reality.

Now there is a storyline and once you get into it, it is good but it’s hard to get past the layers of (to a woman) boring man-stuff. There’s a fashion in women-centric novels at the moment for including the recipes of the foods the characters eat, and in Rivers of Gold, there is so much talk of cocktails that I felt it was just the same need being fulfilled but differently. The sex talk is grim and sounds like it’s coming out of a middle aged, over fed man who is partial to botox, as in ‘no thanks, I’m late for a spin class’. But I can imagine plenty of guys really love those scene. Plus Renny gives girls head, so that make him a modern-thinking man, right?

But enough of the man bashing, because Rivers of Gold is a good book. Dunn has some great ideas and thoughts, which translate well on paper as the thoughts and ideas of his characters. He can also write well and in this age of self-publishing, that has to be recognized.

Naturally, this book, both these books, are populated with men and deal with how men think. The women are superficial, attractive or sexual characters or remarkable because they’re not attractive or sexual. I read and enjoyed both books on a surface level, but felt a little out of touch with the context and emotions.

Maybe this is just how guys feel if they read an Alice Walker/Munro collection. To each their own. Thank God we don’t all like the same stuff!

With ebooks picking up pace, many publishers are looking at their back catalogs to see what hidden gems they might have that would appeal to modern audiences. Some of these re-releases are genuinely in demand. When The Talented Mr. Ripley came out as a movie, Patricia Highsmith saw a resurgence in popularity and the various publishers experienced a windfall from the re-release of the Ripliad series and then The Cry of the Owl and Deep Water.

Agatha Christie also regularly sees a surge in sales, and whenever this happens, old releases in the same cozy crime and period genre often find their way onto the market. This month, I’ve been handed a bunch of these to review. And some of them are brilliant lost treasures.

Arthur J. Rees, The Hand in the Dark, The Moon Rock, and The Hampstead Mystery

Arthur John Rees was an Australian mystery writer. In his early twenties, he went to England and made this the location of many of his classics.

The Hand in the Dark is a ‘closed room mystery’. A woman is shot in a country home when everyone is at dinner downstairs and are therefore not implicated. However, a mysterious figure is seen in the bushes by the butler when he goes to fetch the police. Surely, it must be the killer! However, the gun and a bloody rag are soon discovered in the room of a maid and she is arrested. But in a further twist, once the nervous husband recovers his senses, he seeks out the services of a famous detective, as he is convinced she is innocent. This story is wonderful. Perhaps a little predictable (a golden rule in these types of stories is that it is never the staff), however, the story flows and uncovers various elements along the way that keeps the reader guessing.

The Moon Rock is of a similar feel. A rich man obsessed with having his title reinstated is found shot dead after he disinherits his newly discovered-as-illegitimate daughter. Did she do it, did her love interest do it or was it his faithful but overly familiar servant? And who is the ‘monster’ the dead man was running from? The Moon rock offers a story within a story and only once this story is played out, do we start to guess the truth.

However, I also received The Hampstead Mystery. This started off well, a rich man comes home early from a shooting party in secret and is shot at home. The police only discover it when they are sent an anonymous letter. The question being, who sent the letter and are they the murderer. Unfortunately, this story was a little convoluted compared to the other two and didn’t quite have the same charm. Just goes to show, not all books by the same author will go down well as re-releases.

Pearl S. Buck, Death in the Castle

The description goes, “An ancient castle, a cash-strapped and psychologically unstable aristocratic couple, and the rumor of ghosts weave together in this sparkling historical mystery.” Sound’s good doesn’t it? But it really isn’t for a number of reasons. In reality, the plot is about a castle about to be sold for transport to the US and the hope that some hidden treasure can be found to stave off the need for the sale.

I honestly thought – this must be written by an American teenager who knows nothing about British aristocrats. The behaviour of the family and the staff is like a Disney cartoon version of an upper-class household. There is also a scene where the Prime Minister repeatedly calls the King ‘Your Majesty’ in the same conversation. There’s a sub-plot about the butler’s orphaned granddaughter lording it around the house that was cringe worthy and bizarre. All in all, the writing was silly, with a Mills and Boon type feel.

I started reading this book unaware that the author was a Nobel prize winner, and that was probably for the best because I judged it on the writing alone. Buck was an American and wrote The Good Earth (1931) which was about her insights into the civil unrest in China. It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and William Dean Howells Medal. So, I guess it’s true what they say – write about what you know. And just because a book is a classic – doesn’t make it a good one…

Eileen is the story of a 24-year-old woman in a small town in New England sometime in the early sixties. She lives with her emotionally cruelly but not physically abusive alcoholic father, where she has taken on a carer, co-dependent role since the death of her mother. Eileen works in a children’s prison and dreams of emptying her father’s bank account and going off to start a new life in New York. She doesn’t have any friends and seems to be suffering from body dysmorphia, telling us one minute that she is fat and the next that she weights 100lbs. The story is essentially about Eileen leaving X-ville.

The Review

This is a hard book to pigeonhole. On the one hand, it is wonderfully written, poetic, looping, well observed and fascinating and on the other seems full of mistakes, repetitive language and missed opportunities with a rather flat climax.

To start with the good bits – I was hooked from the very beginning. I was mesmerized by Moshfegh’s prose and I love an anti-hero. With set ups such as ‘this would be the last time I left the office,’ I was fully on board to hear about Eileen’s adventures. As the character study deepened, I had a feeling reminiscing of reading Dostoevsky. When the Rebecca character came along, I was excited too. She was drawn so well, I was convinced she might have been someone I knew. Their developing relationship sounded exactly like an experience I’d had with a beautiful, confident redhead at about that age. And Rebecca’s unhinged actions, which bring about the catalyst for Eileen’s change, were totally unpredictable from my POV. So if I could have just had these parts I would have been thrilled by Eileen.

However… there were too many issues for me in this book to make it enjoyable. The first 20 pages of exposition soon turned into 80 pages of the same information told from another experience. We learn early on that her father is a drunk, that she has body issues, that she steals, that she’s ambivalent about a range of elements in her life, but these get revisited time and time again with no further effect. The only outcome is that things we are told – that the author tells us are so for Eileen – get confused. Yes, Eileen is an unreliable character regarding her body and feelings about sex, but in one passage she tells us she has an idea of what a penis looks like from her father’s porno mags and 20 pages later she tells us as her father’s mags don’t include penises, she relies on a text book. There’s also some details about her mother which don’t seem to mesh. At the beginning, she bitterly complains that the house is dirty because her mother isn’t there to clean up anymore and later on gives us the impression that her mother was a poor housekeeper. This feels like the subject has been over written to the point where the author has lost hold of the threads. However, if it is meant to be further evidence of unreliability, it goes so far as to make anything she says dismissible.

I was really looking forward to reading Eileen, so much so that I didn’t even read all of the Guardian review before searching it out. If I had, I would have read that the book fails as a thriller. It was only after I finished Eileen that I went back to the review, curious what Sandra Newman had said of it and why. That’s when I read the last line ….

“Eileen is original, courageous and masterful…however, the plot machinery simply stands immobile until it’s cranked into life at the very end, whereupon it unceremoniously malfunctions and falls apart…”

I hate to end a review with a review, but that sums it up. Eileen is beautifully written prose, but the plot is not great thriller or suspense fiction material.